It turned out to be third time lucky for John Elkington on his
latest visit to the World Economic Forum.

Even when jet-lagged, Bill Clinton knows how to hold Davos Man
and Woman in the palm of his hand. Count me more or less in their number.
Kicking off this years World Economic Forum on 21 January, he used language
which was to resonate through the rest of that high-octane, high testosterone
week. Nothing new there: Google the phrase Its the Economy, Stupid!
- the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign slogan - and youll find its echoes
everywhere. But now, it seems, Clinton s implicit message when on the
broad range of economic, social and environmental challenges we face is, Its
the System, Stupid!

Instead of making flying visits to people like the Grameen Banks
Muhammad Yunus, he suggested, we should bring Yunus  and folk like the
property-rights-for-the-poor campaigner Hernando de Soto  in from the
cold. Mainstream them. No doubt some corporate bottoms shifted uneasily in
their seats at this call for some sort of Third Way revolution, but what exactly
was Clinton prescribing, exactly? Sadly, at least in my memory, he was long
on concept and short on detail.

He was, he said, all for systematic change, but the scale of
the challenges we now face requires systemic change. Well, fine, and no doubt
he would have won nods from many of those across the road at the Public
Eye on Davos and, indeed, at the anti-WEF World Social Forum, held this
year in Mumbai, India. But most of these people, I suspect, would have soon
parted company with the Davos crowd  even with Clinton - in terms of
how much, how far, how fast and at whose expense.

Thinking back, though, it strikes me that it would be easy to
over-dramatise the chasm between Davos and Mumbai. The divides are there,
of course, but, willingly or not, both sides are in the process of adjusting
their mindsets. In fact, this was the third time I had attended the World
Economic Forums annual summit and I was forcefully struck by just how
far both the nature and content of the debate have shifted over the past three
years.

At WEF, many once forceful globalizers are now off balance,
some even taking part in sessions on corporate social responsibility and sustainable
development. Its not yet a question of Globalizers Anonymous,
but the agenda is a lot more nuanced than it was just a few years back. And,
for the most part still in a parallel universe, a growing number of former
anti-globalizers are trying on labels like alter-mondialiste and talking in
terms of responsible globalisation.

Several swallows never did make a summer, but the basis for
some form of convergence is clearly there. That really wasnt the case
a few years back. The first time I got the call, in 2002, the WEF event was
held in New York, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The following year, 2003,
most of the caravan returned happily to snowy Davos, in Switzerland . This
time, though, there were bitter recriminations between America and its allies
- who were actively planning for war and those who opposed invasion, with
or without UN sanction. One of the sessions I remember best was the one where
General Wesley Clark pointed energetically to places on the map of Iraq where
the coalition forces expected to be attacked with anthrax and other weapons
of mass destruction.

What a difference twelve months can make. This year, by contrast,
US Vice-President Dick Cheney was in conciliatory mood. And my overall impression,
while British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw drew no cheers for his lacklustre
defence of the Iraqi venture, was that most participants were much more interested
in what would happen to the US recovery and to the dollar. Most seemed to
have little appetite for major changes in the economic architecture.

And something else had changed too, it seemed to me. Looking
back, 2002 saw the WEF summit in New York invaded by a fairly considerable
number of NGOs and fellow travellers, myself included. The trend evolved further
in 2003. On both occasions, demonstrations in the streets outside helped keep
the political pot bubbling. You could almost feel the steam percolating up
through the floorboards into some of the sessions. This year, by contrast,
the security forces choked off most of the protests in and around Davos, and
 whether it was a related trend or not  the NGO voices seemed
muted.

Behind the scenes, true, there were clashes between WEF officials
and some NGOs on the best ways forward. Afterwards, the head of one highly
reputable NGO told me that he  they - would not be coming back. I could
understand the frustration. A couple of the parallel sessions I attended were
surprisingly glib and ill-informed, although in my experience they were the
exception. While you hear some of their research partners seethe that the
relationship with WEF is pretty one sided, with the Forum claiming most of
the credits, it has positioned itself as the most coherent global platform
for integrated debate in this area.

When I challenged WEF co-CEO Jose Maria Figuieres, a former
president of Costa Rica , on the issue of whether the Forum would ever take
a stand position on a major policy issue, he stressed that it is essentially
neutral in what it does. But, however you judge that claim, it really is leaning
into the debate a bit more these days.

This year, for example, the WEF Global Governance Initiative
launched its first annual report. And it is surprisingly critical of current
efforts to tackle the priority issues identified at the 2000 UN Millennium
Summit, in the form of the Millennium Development Goals. Scoring each of seven
areas of activity out of a maximum of 10 for 2003, WEF set the numbers such
that a 0 means retrogression, whereas a 10 means that
the world  that is, national governments, businesses, civil society
and international organizations taken together - essentially did everything
needed to be on track to reach the goals.

The report came up with the following results: peace and security
(3), poverty (4), hunger (3), education (3), health (4), environment (3) and
human rights (3). Reading the numbers, it struck me that the world really
deserves a school report I got some time late in the 1950s: Sets himself
low standards and consistently fails to achieve them.

Whatever you think of WEF, this is an important contribution.
Nor is this the only initiative WEF is helping drive forward in this area.
Indeed, one of the reasons the NGOs probably seemed a bit muted to me this
year was that the voices of the social entrepreneurs in Davos had been wound
up several notches. Convened by the Schwab Foundation, also founded by WEF
founder Klaus Schwab and his wife Hilde, the entrepreneurs came together for
the first time at the WEF summit in New York . After a slightly wobbly start,
more of them hit the ground running in Davos in 2003 and most really got into
their stride this year.

Most social entrepreneurs today are unknown to the general public.
Some, like Muhammad Yunus or Bunker Roy of the Barefoot College , may be well
known to Bill Clinton and be covered fairly regularly in the international
media, but for most of us most of what they do tends to disappear into the
background noise. Nor are they guaranteed to succeed. Many of them will fail,
some more than once. Such is the life of entrepreneurs, perhaps even more
so of social entrepreneurs. But these people have the potential to transform
the way in which hundreds of millions of people live, learn and work.

A huge and growing variety of social entrepreneurs are tackling
such issues as environmental protection, family planning, the empowerment
of women, fair trade, food security, the homeless, HIV/AIDS orphans and youth
development. Where markets fail, as they do in relation to many of these issues,
social entrepreneurs are working on leapfrog thinking, technology and business
models to do the previously undoable. They are not primarily motivated by
profit  although many are more than happy to make a profit.

In short, the phrase The impossible takes a little longer
could have been coined for them. It has been my great good fortune to be in
the passenger seat as they began their WEF breakthrough. In 2002, I sat in
on the social entrepreneur session in New York . In 2003, I facilitated the
Davos social entrepreneurs session. And this year, with Pamela Hartigan, who
runs the Schwab Foundation, I had the extraordinary privilege of interviewing
15 or so social entrepreneurs for a book we are planning. Thats around
a quarter of the Schwab Foundations current network - and I emerged
supercharged.

No wonder Clinton name-checks these people in his speeches.
Both he and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan have every excuse for pleading
exhaustion in the wake of their continuous efforts to get these issues onto
the political agenda. But an hour with any of these entrepreneurs is like
the shot of monkey gland extract that some rich people apparently used to
come to Switzerland for. (And, who knows, perhaps some of the Davos crowd
still do?)

Whatever, the real question right now is how we can initiate
the necessary top-down changes to the market system to help social entrepreneurs
bring their bottom-up activities to scale. Maybe it will help if we adopt
the Its the System, Stupid! mantra, even sticking it on
our fridge doors. But we can all be sure of one thing: only if we are prepared
to throw our collective weight behind these extraordinary pioneers can we
hope to see evidence of real progress in future Global Governance Initiative
scorecards.